Nick Bostrom reasoned that if any civilisation might feasibly produce an 'ancestor simulation', we're almost certainly living in a simulated world. Rizwan Virk explains why reaching this simulation point is no longer a fantasy, and why video games might offer the best description of reality.
While most people first considered the idea that we may be living inside a computer simulation after seeing The Matrix - the blockbuster movie which came out in 1999 - it is really the modern version of an old argument that the world around us isn’t the “real world”. Versions of this argument have ranged from Plato’s allegory of the cave to Descartes dreams about an “evil demon” that was deceiving him, and different variations have played a part in almost every major religious tradition.
The “new” element that has brought simulation theory to the forefront, is the development of computation. Perhaps one of the first modern incarnations of this idea came from science fiction writer Philip K. Dick (whose stories, incidentally, served as inspiration for The Matrix). He declared at the Metz sci-fi conference in 1977 that “we are living in a computer programmed reality”. Dick’s speech was looked on with eyebrows raised, almost as if he’d gone mad.
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